This bill modifies existing Washington law to impose uniform contract management requirements and expand whistleblower and state auditor duties. It directs the relevant department to adopt statewide contract management policies with specific minimum elements (precontract selection procedures, complaint and protest processes, alternative dispute resolution, performance measures and benchmarks, model contract terms including recovery of staff time costs, criteria for amendments and terminations, and monitoring of performance-based contracts). It prohibits contractors from charging for access to contract-generated data and requires contractors to provide that data to the contracting agency, the joint legislative audit and review committee, and the state auditor; it also authorizes use of electronic signatures and encourages performance-based contracts with payment contingent on outcomes. The act amends and clarifies definitions in chapter 42.40 RCW (including “auditor,” “employee,” “good faith,” “improper governmental action,” “gross mismanagement,” and “whistleblower”), requires agencies to designate and notify individuals who receive whistleblower reports, and requires written summaries and annual notices about whistleblower procedures and protections to employees, with a prominently displayed list of public officials authorized to receive reports. The bill also expands the state auditor’s authority and duties by requiring audits when there is reasonable cause to suspect misuse of public moneys, mandating random-sample audits of entities that received public moneys in the prior five years (with prioritization rules), explicitly authorizing audits of nonprofit corporations that provide personal services to state agencies or clients, allowing financial audits to be performed as agreed-upon procedures per the 1998 AICPA standards, permitting the auditor to charge contracting agencies for audits of nonprofits (with those agencies expected to seek recovery of costs), requiring immediate reporting of known or suspected loss of public funds or illegal activity by state and local governments and public officials to the auditor, directing the auditor to adopt implementing policies, and requiring publication of an anonymized annual dashboard and an official annual report by December 31. These are procedural and administrative changes rather than creation of new crimes or changes to criminal penalties. Some details are missing from the extracted text: the specific department named in RCW 39.26.180 is not identified here, the complete list of the auditor’s duties is cut off in the provided material, the specific deadline language in RCW 42.40.040(1) is not included, and any effective dates or additional amendments to RCW 43.09.055 and 43.09.185 beyond the quoted portions are not present.

If enacted, state agencies and public colleges would have to follow a single set of contract management rules that push for performance-based deals, require agencies to monitor contractor performance, and forbid contractors from charging extra to access any data the contractor produces (including underlying models and methodologies). Contractors would face new obligations to give contract data to the contracting agency, the legislative audit committee, and the state auditor, include whistleblower-reporting terms, and accept standard dispute, amendment, and termination clauses; nonprofits and other providers could see more audits, and contracting agencies may be billed for those audit costs and expected to try to recover them from the audited entity. The people most affected are state agency contract managers (who will need to adopt new policies, track performance, educate employees about whistleblower rules, and possibly absorb or recover audit-related costs), contractors and nonprofit service providers (who will likely incur compliance costs, lose the ability to restrict or sell access to contract-generated data, and face performance-based payment risk), and the state auditor’s office (which will take on more audit and reporting work, publish an annual anonymized dashboard and report, and enforce immediate reporting of suspected losses). The text leaves unclear which specific department must issue the uniform policies and the exact deadline referenced for reporting to the auditor, so implementation timing and a few administrative roles remain uncertain.